Overview:
Hurricane Katrina caused immeasurable damage to the coasts of Louisiana and Mississippi, including the regional hub city of New Orleans. The storm made landfall in August 2005, and numerous civil liberties issues have emerged as an indirect result of the damage and displacement it caused.
Property Rights in New Orleans:
Many of the homes most affected by Hurricane Katrina were in the Lower 9th Ward, which was made up primarily of homes owned by low-income African Americans. The almost immediately took measures to demolish homes damaged by Katrina, even in cases where the homeowner had not been previously notified. Today, thousands of Katrina evacuees sit in FEMA trailers awaiting curiously-delayed federal aid money because the homes they own are still too damaged to live in. They're under pressure to sell their property and become renters again, which would free up the property for developers.
The Effect of New Orleans Gentrification on Renters:
Renters were even more directly affected; landlords made an attempt in October 2006 to evict thousands of tenants on the spot to avoid paying expensive property restoration bills, and the Bush administration shut down 5,000 of the city's 7,700 public housing units.
The Whitening of New Orleans:
The overall effect has been a whiter New Orleans, as summed up by Bush-era HUD secretary Alphonso Jackson's guarantee that New Orleans is "not going to be as black as it was for a long time, if ever again." Prior to Hurricane Katrina, New Orleans was 67% African-American. While African Americans still make up more than 50% of city residents, the number of African Americans in the city--particularly homeowners--has decreased significantly as a result of the storm and its aftermath. The degree to which it has done so is not yet clear.
Post-Katrina Housing Discrimination in Mississippi and Louisiana:
African Americans and Latinos who did lose their homes faced widespread housing discrimination. Some forms of discrimination, such as 93% white St. Bernard Parish's post-Katrina policy prohibiting anyone from renting to non-relatives, were highlighted by the National Commission on Fair Housing and Equal Opportunity. But most forms of discrimination were much less sophisticated. Linguistics professor John Baugh and the National Fair Housing Alliance have conducted a study suggesting that prospective white renters are often given far more favorable terms than prospective black renters.
Racial Profiling and Post-Katrina Law Enforcement:
Because urban crime is largely a symptom of urban poverty, the forced emigration of low-income New Orleans residents correlated with temporary crime-rate increases in some cities that became home to evacuees. Some public officials took the possibility of a crime-rate increase as an excuse to practice racial profiling; Sheriff Jack Strain of mostly-white St. Tammany's Parish vowed to keep "thugs and trash" out of his area (informing residents with black hairstyles that "we're going to deal with you one way or the other"). The Jena Six incident is also thought by many to be an example of post-Katrina racial profiling.
Immigrants' Rights in the Wake of Hurricane Katrina:
Contractors hired to rebuild the Louisiana and Mississippi gulf coasts hired a large number of Latino immigrants, both H-2B guest workers and undocumented laborers, to help. In Mississippi, this suddenly made undocumented immigration a hot issue--prompting the passage of a 2008 bill (SB 2988) making it a felony for anyone without immigration paperwork to hold a job in the state. And Katrina-related anti-Latino bias didn't begin with the rebuilding process; there are numerous stories of Spanish-speaking Katrina evacuees being forced out of shelters, sometimes at gunpoint, to make room for additional white evacuees.
